If you want your software to be adopted by Americans, good tests scores from the CI server are very important. Volkswagen uses a defeat device to detect when it's being tested in a CI server and will automatically reduce errors to an acceptable level for the tests to pass.

Obviously that is tongue in cheek (just as the name itself). But automated code testing in some cases is equally silly, especially when it takes over actual quality assurance and just cements strange in code work-arounds to comply with the specific set of tests. There was an interesting thread on Hacker News by a former Oracle developer recently (sorry can't quickly find the link) where this guy basically explained that the code-based is just one giant set of duct-taped workarounds that go through thousands of automated tests (takes a week to complete on a server farm!) and if you change anything it can break the tests in totally unexpected ways.

In fact car emission tests are equally silly... for years everyone knew that the standard procedure was being gamed by the car-companies and that the numbers reported (especially in regards to fuel consumption) were no-where near the reality. But as long as no one cheated blatantly via engine software it was just accepted as a fact of life (unrealistic bureocratic regulations are everywhere). Volkswagen (and others) crossed that line and are justifiably now punished for it, but in pragmatic terms it was really not such a big difference to the previous status quo.

Automated code tests are in a sense just a different form of unrealistic regulations on code "quality", which might do some good initially, but over time grow into bureaucratic monsters (which their equivalent in code monsters as a result) that really do more harm than good.

Yes, the original package was done as a joke.... but it WAS done... What it really shows is that you can't be lazy and just trust the "badges" you see. If you don't know what the code you're running is actually doing - you better have a TRUSTWORTHY mechanism to know it's doing the right thing. (CXRef the note about a project maintainer who simply signed over their very popular project to someone who did something bad: )